All the posts from the old forum could have been migrated to the new forum for about £1200. I found the company that could have done it for us.

That’s interesting Chris.
Do you happen to recall how they were proposing to do it?
Maybe you still have the proposal from them?

Information posted here by me in June 2016: http://forum.dloc.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f ... &start=110
I misremembered the cost. It was about £250.

I couldn't see the Board spending £1200 so £250 is worth considering again. I recently heard that the cost of hosting the old forum on a Windows server for Snitz software is about four times the normal cost, so conversion to phpBB3 may be cost effective.

Privacy concerns will still be relevant if a third party takes all the data for conversion, but if the archive is to be archived after conversion as it is now, no one will need to log in, so all usernames and passwords could be deleted (except for administrators).

I think you are overstating the privacy question. There is no information in the forum that identifies a person. You need several pieces of information together to identify a person, for example a name, a date of birth and a specific address.
All that exists in the forum is a name, which of itself is not enough to identify a person and therefore there is not a legal privacy issue. There is also a general location and a user name. None of this is sufficient to identify a person, there could be any number of people with the same name in that general location. Even if passwords were available to the organisation doing the conversion there would be a contract between the DLOC and that third party and confidentiality would be part of that contract. Any organisation that is doing this kind of conversion will be accustomed to having this kind of information and be familiar with dealing with it on a confidential basis.

When I said that usernames could be deleted before handing over the data, I meant email addresses and passwords, not usernames, as usernames would have to be retained for threads to make any sense.

The job has probably been made more complicated now because in addition to converting the posts and information from the old forum format to the new forum format, the resulting converted posts will need to be ingested somehow into the new forum and merged with the data that has built up in the new forum over the last 3 years. I have no idea how to achieve that, hopefully the organisation who does any conversion would also be able to advise and possible assist.
Had this been done at the outset when I first posted this information then the conversion could have formed the basis for the start of the new forum and we would have simply built on from there.

That's an awful lot of posts Chris! But I see the major information is on the first page.
The high annual fee for keeping it running is because it's using the costly MS SQL database. There are ways around this so we will see if it can be migrated to a cheaper base while leaving it intact. Peter Baker is having a look at what we may do.

I'm not sure what you mean by "That's an awful lot of posts".
There are just over 123,000 posts in total in the old forum. That's not very many. In a conversion like this the number of posts doesn't make that much difference hence the very small cost of $20 for the increment above 100,000 to 200,000 posts. Most of the work comes in the initial set up of the conversion process. After that it is largely automated and just churns through the data.
Unfortunately I don't have the email exchange with gConverters from that time but the figures I quoted in my post would have come from an exchange of emails. A $350 one time fee to convert all the old posts seems very cheap to me. Once converted it would be done with no ongoing old forum maintenance costs. I fail to understand why there is such a reluctance to convert this. Why waste time looking for an alternative way of keeping the old forum running? It seems that the board are doing anything and everything to avoid moving the old posts across.
Surely it can't hurt to make a proper enquiry to gConverters?

Chris, sorry I meant on that topic you referred me to - there’s 18 pages of posts. So quite a debate.
It’s not a reluctance, it’s just new to me and I need to understand it further before deciding what to do.
Right now we’ve paid for the old forum to keep running as it is.